Outside, the cool night air did little to clear her head. Cami paced up and down the front throughway, trying to quell the emotions swirling inside her. This stranger, Klaus Mikaelson, had made her feel so strongly, had stirred up more in her than she had known she had in her. She hadn't had such a strong, positive emotion in months.

It was clouding her head now with a million other thoughts. What did this mean for her and Daniel? Daniel, who had been by her side this whole time? Was she cheating on him just by thinking about this Klaus guy? Why couldn't she feel this attracted to Daniel anymore? Maybe she wasn't trying hard enough. She still loved Daniel, still cared about him so much, maybe she just needed to turn her mind off.

"Cami?"

She turned around to find Daniel coming out the front entrance of the country club. "Are you alright?"

"Can we go somewhere?" she said. She was hitching up her determination, knowing that she needed an outlet for all the confusion whirling around within her.

"Do you want to go home?" Daniel was studying her face, looking worried.

"No, I just want to be alone with you for a minute," she said. And before he could say anything in return, she slipped her hand into his and was leading him back into the country club. She took him down a hall, away from the ballroom, looking for anywhere private.

"Are you okay? Do you want to talk?" Daniel was saying, but she ignored him.

Finally, she came upon a women's restroom and pulled him in quickly before he could object. Cami shut the door behind them, turning the lock until it clicked.

"Cami, what's going on?" Daniel's brow was furrowed, studying her carefully.

Pushing him back against the door, she threw herself at him, kissing him roughly. At first, he stood frozen, not kissing her back, his palms turned up in a gesture of confusion. Keeping her lips pressed firmly to his, she took his hands and placed them around her waist. When she kissed down his neck, he finally responded, turning her so that she was now pinned against the locked door, and kissing her on the lips just as passionately as she had kissed him.

"Cami, Cami, babe," he said, smiling in spite of himself as her hand rubbed over the front of his pants. "Are you alright? How much have you had to drink?"

"Just let me kiss you," she said, pressing her lips breathily along his neck. She could see that he wanted to keep asking her if she was sure she was alright, so she kissed him even harder to shut him up. Beginning to lose herself in the moment, she felt her heart racing, her skin beginning to flush, relishing the warm tingling of his lips against hers. It was working, she thought. All her racing thoughts, all the confusion that Klaus Mikaelson had stirred up within her were beginning to settle and die away.

As she kissed Daniel, she tried to convey so many things with her kisses: I'm okay. We're okay. It's going to be alright, we'll get through this, whatever this is. She held her to him, feeling closer to him emotionally than she had in a long time.

She slid his jacket off his shoulders and tossed it to the bathroom floor. Undoing the buttons of his shirt, she smiled up at him, hungry to see more of his skin. He hiked up the skirt of her dress, pulling her panties down until they caught around her ankles. She kicked them off, leaving them beside Daniel's jacket, and then his shirt, which she had just finished removing.

Roughly picking her up, Daniel moved her over to the bathroom counter, setting her down as he kissed down her neck and along her collarbone. As he kissed lower, he sank to his knees, pressing his lips along the tops of her thighs until she tilted her hips up for him. The ache between her legs was stronger than it had been in a very long time, and she was desperate now, her head thrown back in anticipation.

It was euphoric when Daniel finally pressed his mouth against her, and she smiled as she moaned, wrapping her fingers up in his black hair to hold him closer. Her mind, for once, was blissfully blank, and she felt herself getting lost in the pleasure. For a second, she wondered if there was a way she could make this last forever, if she could somehow make the pleasure permanent, if only to keep her mind this empty.

And then someone's face flashed before her closed eyes. Klaus Mikaelson. She didn't want to be thinking about him now, she wanted to be thinking about her amazing, supportive boyfriend who was currently giving her exquisite pleasure. But still Klaus's face appeared for a split second whenever she closed her eyes.

It wasn't even that she was thinking about him because he was so attractive. It's just that his image kept coming back because she had something to remember in relation to him. What was it? Her brain kept searching and searching for the reason as to why she would be thinking about him at a time like this.

Finally, it clicked. She had to come up with the theme for the Beaterrific campaign. And being in the bathroom now with her boyfriend on his knees for her was taking away from her precious time to work on that. And suddenly everything stopped for her— the passion, the pleasure, her empty mind. It all flooded back just as suddenly as it had been pushed aside, and she remembered it all: her impossible task, her sh*t job, her crushing unhappiness. And as it came back in, it felt like all of it was hitting her twice as hard, knocking the wind out of her.

"Daniel? Daniel," she said softly. "Babe, stop."

He looked up at her, taking in her pained expression. He stood up, pulling her skirt back into place. "Cami, please tell me what's wrong," he said quietly. "Please, I can try to help."

He sounded so sad that her eyes started to well with tears. She wanted so badly to tell him what was going on with her, all the terrible thoughts that constantly buzzed around her head, threatening to drown her once and for all. But every time she opened her mouth to start explaining, nothing came out, as if there had been an Off switch on her vocal cords.

She faked a smile for him. "I'm just tired," she said, trying to sound convincing.

"Cami," he said, his tone warning. He knew she was lying.

"I'm tired. Can we go back to the party?" Cami hopped off the counter, unlocking the door to the bathroom and pulling it open. She left Daniel in there, hurriedly trying to re-button his shirt so he could follow her.

"Do you want to go home?" he called after her, but she was already down the hallway, on her way back to the ballroom.

Her heart was hammering loudly in her chest now, and her whole body felt like it was vibrating. Try as she might, she couldn't stop her hands from shaking. She tried to breathe, tried to shut down her racing thoughts so that she could try to calm down, but everything was swelling like a balloon inside her.

Back in the ballroom, she saw Klaus across the room. His eyes locked on her, and he started towards her, a question poised on his lips. She didn't know what he was going to say— Have you thought about the campaign? Any ideas so far? How's the brainstorming going? Are you alright?— but she knew she couldn't handle any of those questions. Before he could take another step towards her, she was turning on her heels and practically running from the room.

Willing herself to keep her pace controlled at a fast walk, she felt the tears start to fall. She made sure to take a roundabout route out of the country club building in order to avoid anyone that might be walking by. She especially didn't want to see Daniel. She needed to be alone more than anything else.

As soon as she found an exit door she burst into the night air and kicked her shoes off, picking them up as she started to run across a small bit of pavement, and then the smooth grass of the golf course. Tears streamed down her face, ruining her makeup, but she didn't care, and she couldn't stop their flow. Cami needed to keep running, needed to keep crying, needed a release for all these intense emotions bottled up inside her.

She just felt so overwhelmed with everything, with the deadline on which her promotion rested in the balance, with her disconnection with Daniel, with the spark lit within her by a single minute spent with Klaus Mikaelson. And once the tears started to fall, she couldn't get them to stop.

Cami ran and ran and ran, her aching feet cooled by the dewy touch of the smooth grass on the golf course. The night air flowed over her skin, brushing the hair out of her face, starting to dry her tears into tight track marks on her cheeks.

A stitch in her side finally made her slow down, and then stop completely. She bent over, clutching her side, trying to get a breath in her, but no matter how much air she gulped, she felt she couldn't breathe.

Dropping to her knees in the grass, Cami sobbed in earnest now, letting go of all her inhibitions and letting all her emotions out. She was far enough away from the party that no one would hear her, and it was dark enough now that no one would really see her unless they knew where to look. She cried because she didn't know how to meet her deadline, because she didn't think she could do it, and now she wouldn't get a promotion and she couldn't have her old job back either because now there was a replacement for her. She cried because she wished that she still felt connected to Daniel, she wished that she still loved him like she used to, but she knew that they had grown distant. She cried because she didn't think that there was any way to salvage their relationship. And she cried because all these things scared her beyond belief.

After several minutes, her sobs dissipated to a quiet weeping. Soon, the tears stopped altogether, and Cami sat in the grass with an eerie sense of calm settling over her. She felt completely numb now, almost hollowed out, like her emotions had been a tangible entity that she had expelled through her tears, and now that they were all out, she was empty. She had experienced the emptiness like this before, and it had scared her, but now she felt almost exhilarated. She felt free.

She stood and dusted off the bottom of her dress, picking up her shoes. Her mind was empty now, and all she could think or feel were the physical sensations around her— the cool dampness of the grass beneath her bare feet, the light breeze that raised goosebumps on her skin.

On the back side of the tenth hole, she sat in the grass, and then laid on her back. It was almost completely dark out now, and she watched the white glow of the moon illuminating the navy sky.

Her mind was clear now, and she would have given anything to keep it that way forever. Whenever a troubling thought crept in, she just thought, I'm hiding away. No one can find me here. I have no responsibilities. Right now I don't owe anything to anyone. And for a while this worked.

The stars came out, shimmering in the night sky, and she began to count them. She thought of how she used to take astronomy classes through the park district when she was in elementary school, and she tried to remember any of the constellations she might recognize. She could see Orion and Cassiopeia, but she didn't recognize anything else.

Studying the stars that continued to emerge, she decided she would make her own constellations. A tickling voice in the back of her head tried to remind her that this was a waste of time, that she was just giving herself less time to work on the Beaterrific campaign. And then she would think to herself that coming up with new constellations was more important, and than thousands of years from now, people would look up at the night sky and be able to recognize the ones she was coming up with right now.

Raising her arm, she pointed her finger at an arrangement of stars, tracing an imaginary outline around them in the rough shape of a duck, or at least what she thought was a duck. "I will call this new constellation, 'Gerald,'" she said to herself.

"Gerald, huh?" a voice said from behind her.

Cami unsteadily tried to leap to her feet. The alcohol was hitting her in earnest now, and she was pretty moderately drunk. A hand caught her forearm, steadying her. When she looked up, she found herself face to face with Klaus Mikaelson.